I watched the HBO movie about LBJ last night. I had too, as LBJ remains one of my favorite Presidents ever. There's a saying: the French never forgave the world for losing it's empire. This is sort of how I feel about LBj.
I feel like LBJ didn't fail America, America failed LBJ.
Indeed, it's ironic that this LBJ movie came out now as I'm currently reading another one of Jeff Greenfield's great counterfactual books.
http://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Greenfield/e/B000APY2IG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
I already read his book on if Al Gore had won and the one of what if Kennedy had lived? Now I'm onto his And Then Everything Changed.
There are a few different counterfactual stories in this one. But two of them again are all about the Kennedy's and LBJ. First what would have happened if JFK was assassinated by the other assassin who wanted to kill him just after he was elected?
Greenfield's answer: LBJ would have done something quicker on civil rights but would have listened to the generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis that would lead to the actual use of nuclear weapons by the Soviets in Cuba.
Spoiler alert: LBJ has a heart attack and his VP, Hubert Humphrey has to save the day with the Soviets.
This is on top of the previous book where JFK lived. Greenfield assumes that he would have avoided the pitfall of Vietnam.
So LBJ always comes out the loser. And indeed, in the third LBJ-Kennedy story in And Then Everything Changed, RFK is not assassinated in 1968. This changes everything: the country is so releieved not to lose him too-after losing JFK and MLK-that he's elected President and accomplishes all kinds of great things.
So again LBJ is the loser. It seems that no amount of counterfactuals can ever make things better for him.
Is this because Greenfield has a lower opinion of LBJ? His theory of LBJ was that he cared mostly about his Great Society domestic agenda and tended to be deferential to the military establishment, if for no other reason than to give the Great Society political cover.
That doesn't sound implausible. In the movie All the Way, it was hard not to feel LBJ's pain when he complained 'That darn weak on military thing again. The Democrats beat Hitler and Tojo, what more do the GOPers want?
So maybe the reason LBJ always does poorly in Greenfield's parallel universes is because Vietnam was the tripwire that would come to hurt the Democrats.
Of course, we don't know that JFK would not have escalated in Vietnam. He would have faced the same Right wing political pressures.
And as much as LBJ hated RFK, it's hard not to sympathize with him just a little bit. After all, RFK had it in for him from day one, the minute his brother chose him.
RFK bascially just didn't like his face-or his Texas drawl. LBJ could never do anything to please the liberals.
He wasn't trusted because he was from the South and because he did have a history, after all, of gutting civil rights bills. Still, he was the one who would make civil rights a priority, not JFK and certainly not Bobby who had actually warned JFK not to say too much about civil rights in 1960.
Yet in 1968, Bobby Kennedy-who had wiretapped MLK as Jack's AG-had all this African-American support while it was LBJ, the Southern redneck who ended up passing civil rights as well as the Great Society: a crucial part of that was actually immigration reform.
After almost 40 years of very strict immigration laws, LBJ opened them up, including for non white immigrants.
Beyond that, LBJ was the real culmination of FDR's New Deal, not either of the Kennedy brothers who talked an awful lot about decentralization and welfare reform-an idea not invented by Bill Clinton, it turns out.
LBJ governed like a liberal much more so than did JFK. And JFK and RFK were buddies with McCarthy in the 50s.
Yet LBJ is the guy was pushed out of office in disgrace.
Even the spectre of the peace protesters I find kind of ironic. They taunted LBJ for how many kids he killed today but what did they achieve? LBJ stepped down and Nixon took over who promptly escalated the war and bombed Cambodia.
While we're talking about counterfactuals, I have mixed feelings about Noam Chomsky on the power of the war protesters.
“There is a lot of comparison between opposition to the Iraq war with opposition to the Vietnam war, but people tend to forget that at first there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam war,” said Chomsky.
“In the Iraq war, there were massive international protests before it officially started… and it had an effect. The United Sates could not use the tactics used in Vietnam: there was no saturation bombing by B52s, so there was no chemical warfare – (the Iraq war was) horrible enough, but it could have been a lot worse,” he said.
“And furthermore, the Bush administration had to back down on its war aims, step by step,” he added.
“It had to allow elections, which it did not want to do: mainly a victory for non-Iraqi protests. They could kill insurgents; they couldn’t deal hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. Their hands were tied by the domestic constraints. They finally had to abandon – officially at least – virtually all the war aims,” said Chomsky.
“As late as November 2007, the US was still insisting that the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ allow for an indefinite US military presence and privileged access to Iraq’s resources by US investors – well they didn’t get that on paper at least. They had to back down. OK, Iraq is a horror story but it could have been a lot worse,” he said
“So yes, protests can do something. When there is no protest and no attention, a power just goes wild, just like in Cambodia and northern Louse,” he added.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2009/11/chomsky-credits-the-anti-war-movement/
I feel like LBJ didn't fail America, America failed LBJ.
Indeed, it's ironic that this LBJ movie came out now as I'm currently reading another one of Jeff Greenfield's great counterfactual books.
http://www.amazon.com/Jeff-Greenfield/e/B000APY2IG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
I already read his book on if Al Gore had won and the one of what if Kennedy had lived? Now I'm onto his And Then Everything Changed.
There are a few different counterfactual stories in this one. But two of them again are all about the Kennedy's and LBJ. First what would have happened if JFK was assassinated by the other assassin who wanted to kill him just after he was elected?
Greenfield's answer: LBJ would have done something quicker on civil rights but would have listened to the generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis that would lead to the actual use of nuclear weapons by the Soviets in Cuba.
Spoiler alert: LBJ has a heart attack and his VP, Hubert Humphrey has to save the day with the Soviets.
This is on top of the previous book where JFK lived. Greenfield assumes that he would have avoided the pitfall of Vietnam.
So LBJ always comes out the loser. And indeed, in the third LBJ-Kennedy story in And Then Everything Changed, RFK is not assassinated in 1968. This changes everything: the country is so releieved not to lose him too-after losing JFK and MLK-that he's elected President and accomplishes all kinds of great things.
So again LBJ is the loser. It seems that no amount of counterfactuals can ever make things better for him.
Is this because Greenfield has a lower opinion of LBJ? His theory of LBJ was that he cared mostly about his Great Society domestic agenda and tended to be deferential to the military establishment, if for no other reason than to give the Great Society political cover.
That doesn't sound implausible. In the movie All the Way, it was hard not to feel LBJ's pain when he complained 'That darn weak on military thing again. The Democrats beat Hitler and Tojo, what more do the GOPers want?
So maybe the reason LBJ always does poorly in Greenfield's parallel universes is because Vietnam was the tripwire that would come to hurt the Democrats.
Of course, we don't know that JFK would not have escalated in Vietnam. He would have faced the same Right wing political pressures.
And as much as LBJ hated RFK, it's hard not to sympathize with him just a little bit. After all, RFK had it in for him from day one, the minute his brother chose him.
RFK bascially just didn't like his face-or his Texas drawl. LBJ could never do anything to please the liberals.
He wasn't trusted because he was from the South and because he did have a history, after all, of gutting civil rights bills. Still, he was the one who would make civil rights a priority, not JFK and certainly not Bobby who had actually warned JFK not to say too much about civil rights in 1960.
Yet in 1968, Bobby Kennedy-who had wiretapped MLK as Jack's AG-had all this African-American support while it was LBJ, the Southern redneck who ended up passing civil rights as well as the Great Society: a crucial part of that was actually immigration reform.
After almost 40 years of very strict immigration laws, LBJ opened them up, including for non white immigrants.
Beyond that, LBJ was the real culmination of FDR's New Deal, not either of the Kennedy brothers who talked an awful lot about decentralization and welfare reform-an idea not invented by Bill Clinton, it turns out.
LBJ governed like a liberal much more so than did JFK. And JFK and RFK were buddies with McCarthy in the 50s.
Yet LBJ is the guy was pushed out of office in disgrace.
Even the spectre of the peace protesters I find kind of ironic. They taunted LBJ for how many kids he killed today but what did they achieve? LBJ stepped down and Nixon took over who promptly escalated the war and bombed Cambodia.
While we're talking about counterfactuals, I have mixed feelings about Noam Chomsky on the power of the war protesters.
“There is a lot of comparison between opposition to the Iraq war with opposition to the Vietnam war, but people tend to forget that at first there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam war,” said Chomsky.
“In the Iraq war, there were massive international protests before it officially started… and it had an effect. The United Sates could not use the tactics used in Vietnam: there was no saturation bombing by B52s, so there was no chemical warfare – (the Iraq war was) horrible enough, but it could have been a lot worse,” he said.
“And furthermore, the Bush administration had to back down on its war aims, step by step,” he added.
“It had to allow elections, which it did not want to do: mainly a victory for non-Iraqi protests. They could kill insurgents; they couldn’t deal hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. Their hands were tied by the domestic constraints. They finally had to abandon – officially at least – virtually all the war aims,” said Chomsky.
“As late as November 2007, the US was still insisting that the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ allow for an indefinite US military presence and privileged access to Iraq’s resources by US investors – well they didn’t get that on paper at least. They had to back down. OK, Iraq is a horror story but it could have been a lot worse,” he said
“So yes, protests can do something. When there is no protest and no attention, a power just goes wild, just like in Cambodia and northern Louse,” he added.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2009/11/chomsky-credits-the-anti-war-movement/
I'm less convinced. Sure, the protests in the case of Iraq started immediately, but how effective were they? Bush was re-elected and the War went on for 10 years despite the early protests.
Obama ended it in 2012, not 2009 and to this day there is a lack of closure there.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2009/11/chomsky-credits-the-anti-war-movement/
As for Cambodia, this begs the question: why were the protesters not able to stop Nixon? All they succeeded in is bringing down LBJ.
Obama ran on ending the Iraq War but even he didn't get it done overnight.
I'm not saying the anti war movement is powerless. Certainly they claimed LBJ's scalp. But the war didn't end until 1975 officially. Is that much of a victory?
By the way, I'm not sure that Bush having elections in Iraq was a victory for the protesters. I wasn't aware this was a demand of their's.
And the way Bush and Rumsfeld instituted de-baathification overnight was disastrous. At most what seems to be the case is that an anti war movement may be able to drive down the Presidential Administration that begun the war, but they have less power over the new Administration that replaces it.
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